Jeff Vrabel: Coffee will save your life

Monday

May 21, 2012 at 12:01 AMMay 21, 2012 at 9:15 PM

Now and again science produces some actual news that makes me sit up and call my momma, which apparently is something I have to sit up to do, as it is very hard to dial the phone while reclining. Last week science announced that coffee not only provides your primary reason to get up in the morning (yeah, I said it, CBS' "The Early Show"), and is literally the only reason I can complete all basic tasks between the hours of 2:30 and 6 p.m., but it has other, more additional health benefits as well, such as not dying, which is a pretty good benefit, frankly.

Jeff Vrabel

I rarely pay heed to news out of the world of science, mostly because we're in a recession, people, and I'm not made of heed.

But it's also because such news often arrives in the form of sizable and startling-looking words, many of which contain prefixes (ugh), in periodicals that I do not subscribe to, such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and Redbook. I also find it overly scientific, and the people who write it tend to be like super-obsessed with things like molecules and dark matter and large hadrons colliding, and I had plenty of biology in the 10th grade, thank you very much. If science talked more about Facebook and quidditch, maybe we'd have something.

That said, now and again science produces some actual news that makes me sit up and call my momma, which apparently is something I have to sit up to do, as it is very hard to dial the phone while reclining. Last week science announced that coffee not only provides your primary reason to get up in the morning (yeah, I said it, CBS' "The Early Show"), and is literally the only reason I can complete all basic tasks between the hours of 2:30 and 6 p.m., but it has other, more additional health benefits as well, such as not dying, which is a pretty good benefit, frankly. I'd like to see other beverages come up with a benefit like that. Looking at you, Mello Yello, what do you got in the way of extending the average life expectancy? What's that? Jack squat? I thought so. Just sit there and be mello, loser.

Anyway, and it goes on for a while, but the study basically reveals that coffee is good at making you die less. Now, depending upon the kind of either human or Romney you are, this news will elicit one of two reactions:

1. "AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" (joyously, followed by tearful hugging of increasingly uncomfortable strangers at the bus stop).

2. "I guess that's good news, but I'm not really a coffee drinker so" and it is here that I would stop listening to your boring mouthwords, because if you are not a coffee drinker I cannot imagine what further conversation we would remotely hope to have, as I would literally be half-listening to every fool syllable dribbling out of your face thinking, "You get out of my house you get out right now."

If you are with us in the former fraternity, however, it is hard to imagine being delivered greater news this week, unless they announced that every Facebook user who posts kid pictures kids gets 500 free shares, or that Scarlett Johansson was interested in having lunch at the houses of 36-year-old speedily graying Slovaks while wearing the Black Widow costume every day for a year oh that's right sure eeeeeeverybody look at the creepy columnist guy now.

Back to news: The study, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine and featuring data from the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health, found that, in essence, coffee drinkers have a lower risk of death than non-coffee drinkers. But they're not just talking about you one-cup-a-day amateurs, you plush pink bunny toys of coffee consumption. The study went on to find that people who drink more than three cups a day had a 10 percent LOWER risk of dying, and those who drank 4-5 cups a day had the LOWEST risk of death of all, although that's partly because who has the time to die when you're peeing that much?

And this isn't just death like People Who Drink Coffee Are More Likely To See That Startled Moose Careening Out Of The Forest At Your Honda — this is a decrease in death from heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes, stroke, accidents, carafe explosions, grinder malfunctions, the Colombian rickets, everything.

The story goes on to say that the study doesn't explicitly show what they call a "causal link," which is to say "a link," which is to say, "Stop sobbing in public, you have children for God's sake." Yet this is America, and publishing a story about the health benefits of coffee and then expecting coffee drinkers to not host instant block parties is silly, it's like saying your team won the fantasy sports league but you can't bore people to tears on Facebook about it. So yes, COFFEE SAVES YOUR LIFE, PEOPLE. Thank you, coffee. And thank you, Redbook.

Jeff Vrabel would like to say that all references to Mello Yello and the CBS "Early Show" are fictional, as neither are real. He can be reached at http://jeffvrabel.com or followed at http://twitter.com/jeffvrabel.